Quote Originally Posted by Theodric View Post
A common misconception - it's rare for Pureblood Garleans to be able to manipulate aether but not impossible. The player character is, already, the exception to pretty much every established 'rarity' rule within the game's lore.

Though even if the writers wanted to stick strictly to canon, we've seen magitek effectively mimic everything from conjuring familiars to teleportation anyway. It could easily be handwaved in a similar manner to how male viera and raen/xaela were never seen before throughout Eorzea before their inclusion.
Even if you could play a super-duper special snowflake pureblood Garlean who could use magic, there's also the problem of not having your race brought up once in the 80 or whatever hours of story content where the race as a whole is represented as "the enemy", in a land that has been at war with them for 20-some odd years. The main "good guy" Garlean gets passed that and hides his eye from everyone and is a genetic freak who is a head shorter than other Garleans with different proportions.

Handwaving au ra is one thing, but handwaving you playing as the race that up until the 2nd expansion is only ever represented as the villains trying to destroy the world and cannot use aether normally, as the hero in Eorzea where every single jobs' abilities are described as aetherial manipulation is a pretty big handwave. And that's not taking into account all the technical limitations and the fact we're never getting another race again.